(1949- ) US author whose first novel, Molly Dear: The Autobiography of an Android, or How I Came to my Senses, Was Repaired, Escaped my Master, and Was Educated in the Ways of the World (1988), rewrites Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) as the memoirs of a twenty-first-century Android to satirical effect. Her innocence – assisted by memory wipes (see Memory Edit) – resembles that of Voltaire's Candide, or almost any of John T Sladek's child Robots in a cruel world. Some of the points about Molly's legal enslavement are sharply made. [JC]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →